Reports, minutes, questions and code-snippets from the Open Epigraphic Data Unconference (OEDUc) meeting and network.
This one-day workshop, or “unconference,” held at the Institute of Classical Studies, University of London on May 15, 2017, brings together scholars, historians and data scientists with a shared interest in classical epigraphic data. The event involves no speakers or set programme of presentations, but rather a loose agenda, to be further refined in advance or on the day, which is to use, exploit, transform and “mash-up” with other sources the Open Data recently made available by the Epigraphic Database Heidelberg under a Creative Commons license. Participants with programming and data-processing experience, and those with an interest in discussing and planning data manipulation at a higher level, are equally welcome.

In a letter written in 1530, Fabio Vigili warned Benedetto Egio against the dangers of forgery in general and Annius in particular, and in the 1540s Matal considered it important to include a copy of this letter in his annotations to Mazochi's Epigrammata. By then scholars were exchanging names of suspected sources and discussing signs of forgery, from suspicious circumstances of finding to Matal's general advice to suspect anything from Spain. S. demonstrates how with the development of epigraphical knowledge scholars were becoming especially good at detecting inscriptions concocted on the basis of literary records. The same development, however, altered the nature of forgeries, and there started to appear counterfeits based on other inscriptions, rather than on literary sources, the detection of which proved harder. Here S. offers a most fascinating discussion of Pirro Ligorio, who prolifically forged inscriptions, basing them on existing ones, but also sometimes relying on literary and other evidence.

The practical lesson to be gained from Mark Handley's "Epitaphs, Models, and Texts: A Carolingian Collection of Late Antique Inscriptions from Burgundy" is that many of the syllogai of inscriptions from the Middle Ages may have begun life as model books for the production of epitaphs. He reconstructs the very detailed history of one such sylloge from Paris (BN Lat 2832), which includes various examples of poetry, including a section of epitaphs. Some of the epitaphs derive from extant examples in Gaul, and he argues that the entries in the epigraphic section were collected to serve as a model book for the actual production of tombstones.